Walker joined Difficult Run as an editor in August 2013.
He graduated from the University of North Texas with an MBA in Strategic Management and a BBA in Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management. He's currently a grad student in Government at Johns Hopkins University. He has been published in SquareTwo, BYU Studies Quarterly, Dialogue, Graziadio Business Review, and Economic Affairs. He also contributed to Julie Smith's (ed.) 'As Iron Sharpens Iron: Listening to the Various Voices of Scripture'. His other online writing can be found at Worlds Without End and Times & Seasons. He lives in Denton, Texas, with his wife.
Similar to previous research, a new working paper shows that the gender wage gap is driven largely by the amount of hours men and women choose to work. The authors draw on data from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), explaining that the “bus and train operators are all represented by the same union, Carmen’s Local 589, and are all covered by the same bargaining agreement. The agreement specifies that seniority in one’s garage is the sole determinant of one’s work opportunities. Conditional on seniority, men and women face the same choice sets of schedules, routes, vacation days, and overtime hours, among other amenities” (pg. 2).
What do they find?
We show that a gender earnings gap can exist even in a controlled environment where work tasks are similar, wages are identical, and tenure dictates promotions. The gap of $0.89 in our setting, which is 60% of the earnings gap across the United States, can be explained entirely by the fact that, while having the same choice sets in the workplace, women and men make different choices. Women use the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to take more unpaid time off than men and they work fewer overtime hours at 1.5 times the wage rate. At the root of these different choices is the fact that women value time and flexibility more than men. Men and women choose to work similar hours of overtime when it is scheduled a quarter in advance, but men work nearly twice as many overtime hours than women when they are scheduled the day before. Using W-4 filings to ascertain marital status and the presence of dependents, we show that women with dependents – especially single women – value time away from work more than men with dependents.
When selecting their work schedule for the following quarter, women try to avoid inconvenient days, like weekends, and shifts, like split-shifts, more than men. Prioritizing schedule related amenities over route quality-related amenities, women select routes with higher probabilities of assaults and collisions in order to avoid unfavorable schedules. When faced with having to work an unfavorable schedule, like a weekend, holiday, or split shift, women take more unpaid time off. Men also take more unpaid time off in those circumstances, but they more than make up for lost earnings with overtime. While constrained schedules lead to lower earnings for women, they result in higher earnings for men. In an effort to reduce absenteeism and overtime expenditures, the MBTA oversaw two policy changes: one that made it harder to take unpaid time off with FMLA and another that made it harder to be paid at the overtime rate. While the policy changes reduced the gender earnings gap from $0.89 to $0.94 and made it harder for operators to trade off regular hours for overtime, they also decreased women’swell-being by further constraining the work environment (pg. 34-35).
Michael Cox and Richard Alm of SMU’s O’Neil Center have an essay in D Magazine based on the latest report from the Center. The two
imagine Texas and Mexico as one economy, connected by exports, imports, migration, cross-border business investments, transport infrastructure, tourism, and knowledge transfers. As a combined economy, Texas and Mexico churn out an annual GDP of more than $4 trillion, enough to rank as the world’s sixth-largest economy, just behind Germany and ahead of Russia.
We denote this sprawling and diverse economy by the portmanteau word: Texico. The name captures the reality that over the past quarter-century the Texas and Mexico economies have emerged as highly integrated, making an often-unsung contribution to Texas’ reign as America’s top-performing state economy.
The explain how trade has deeply integrated the two countries:
An often-cited gauge of integration is trade—exports moving south, imports moving north. They totaled $188 billion last year, or more than 11 percent of gross state product, separating Texas from all other states in doing business with Mexico.
Texas companies are finding business opportunities in Mexico—among them, cosmetics-maker Mary Kay Inc. and telecommunications giant AT&T Inc., both based in Dallas-Fort Worth. At the same time, Mexican companies are heading northward and expanding their businesses, including Mission Foods in Irving and the movie theater chain Cinépolis in Addison.
The Texas and Mexico economies are more formidable combined rather than separate. Binational supply chains, for example, take advantage of low production costs in Mexico and highly skilled professional labor in Texas. The companies emerge more competitive in the global marketplace, able to sell their wares at a better price.
Automobile production comes to mind—for good reason. Plants in the Dallas-Fort Worth area are on the northern edge of the Texas-Mexico Automotive SuperCluster region, which includes close to 30 assembly plants and more than 230 parts suppliers in Texas and Mexico’s northern states.
Texas and Mexico have already profited a great deal from their binational economy, even though work began in earnest only recently. Mexico didn’t open its energy and telecom markets until just a few years ago. During negotiations that led to the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico clung to its monopolies in these industries. With its oil output falling, Mexico finally lifted its ban on foreign oil and gas companies three years ago. If all goes well, this should be a bonanza for Texas, with its deep roster of oilfield services and exploration companies. The telecom monopoly expired about the same time—and AT&T rushed in with its wireless service.
The annual report provides a few more interesting insights:
The report explains the slow convergence above: “Other factors like low levels of education shouldn’t be ignored, but the ongoing plague of corruption, cronyism and rising violence go a long way toward explaining why Mexican growth and income haven’t converged with the United States or kept pace with the likes of Chile, South Korea and China” (pg. 13).
Texans are well aware of Mexico’s shortcomings, including corruption and drug-cartel violence. None of these problems will get any better by enacting policies that build barriers against Mexico and harm the Texas and Mexico economies. Perhaps Trump and Obrador will decide that the best course lies in expedient practicality—recognizing the fact that Texico has been working and building a large constituency. If these two leaders don’t make a mess of things, the businesses of Texas and Mexico can take it from there.
I’ve already provided the actual data on a single vote’s value (reminder: it’s virtually zilch). Despite this fact, plenty of people still vote. Why? The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley has an insightful article on the emotions involved with voting:
Voting is an act of altruism. When you vote, you are taking your personal time and effort to advance the collective good, without any guarantee of personal reward—the very heart of what it means to be altruistic.
…In one study, Panagopoulos sent postcards to a subset of random voters before a special election in New York and before a gubernatorial election in New Jersey. The postcards contained either a message encouraging people to vote or a message thanking them for having voted in a recent election. Then, he compared voting percentages for those two groups to a control group who received no postcards.
His findings showed that voters receiving the gratitude postcard voted significantly more—two to three percentage points more—than those not receiving postcards.
…“Making people feel good by reinforcing the notion that society is grateful for their participation in the political process reminds people that they have a role to play and reinforces their willingness to be responsive,” says Panagopoulos.
…[I]n another experiment, he sent postcards thanking people for political participation, in general—without reference to past voting—while others received either the thanks for voting or the reminder postcards used in the other experiments.
In the Georgia primary election that followed, Panagopoulos found that people who received the generic thank-you postcard were more likely to vote—as much or more so than people being specifically thanked for voting, and much more than those who got the simple reminders. To Panagopoulos, this confirms the idea that gratitude was key.
…In one study, people who received information about their own voting behavior in the past seemed to increase their propensity to vote in an upcoming election. Another study found that people will vote more in an election when they see that people they are close to are voting, and that this behavior can spread through social networks.
These kinds of studies add to a body of research showing that our social relationships and emotions play a significant role in how we vote. For example, one study found that when people are told that they might be recognized for voting in a local newspaper or put on an honor roll of voters—to induce feelings of pride—they vote in higher numbers.
Alternatively, when people are warned that their name will be published in a local newspaper for not voting—to induce feelings of shame—this also increases voting. Shame seems to have even more impact than pride.
Altruism, gratitude, friendships, pride, and shame are just a few reasons people go to the polls.
A few months ago, I posted about a new working paper exploring the origins of WEIRD psychology. A brand new job market paper builds on this research:
Political institutions, ranging from autocratic regimes to inclusive, democratic ones, are widely acknowledged as a critical determinant of economic prosperity (e.g. Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009). They create incentives that foster or inhibit economic growth. Yet, the emergence and global variation of growth-enhancing, inclusive political institutions in which people broadly participate in the governing process and the power of the elite is constrained, are not well understood. Initially, inclusive institutions were largely confined to the West. How and why did those institutions emerge in Europe?
This article contributes to the debate on the formation and global variation of inclusive institutions by combining and empirically testing two long-standing hypotheses. First, anthropologist Jack Goody (1983) hypothesized that, motivated by financial gains, the medieval Catholic Church implemented marriage policies—most prominently, prohibitions on cousin marriage—that destroyed the existing European clan-based kin networks. This created an almost unique European family system where, still today, the nuclear family dominates and marriage among blood relatives is virtually absent. This contrasts with many parts of the world, where first- and second-cousin marriages are common (Bittles and Black 2010). Second, several scholars have hypothesized that strong extended kin networks are detrimental to the formation of social cohesion and affect institutional outcomes (Weber, 1958; Todd, 1987; Augustine, 1998). Theologian Augustine of Hippo (354–430) pointed out that marrying outside the kin group enlarges the range of social relations and “should thereby bind social life more effectively by involving a greater number of people in them” (Augustine of Hippo, 354-430 / 1998, p. 665). More recently, Greif (2005), Greif and Tabellini (2017), Mitterauer (2010), and Henrich (forthcoming) combined these two hypotheses and emphasized the critical role of the Church’s marriage prohibitions for Europe’s institutional development (pg. 2).
His findings?:
The analysis demonstrates that already before the year 1500 AD, Church exposure and its marriage regulations are predictive of the formation of communes—self-governed cities that put constraints on the executive. The difference-in-difference analysis does not reveal pre-trends and results are robust to many specifications. They hold within historic political entities addressing concerns that the relation is driven by other institutional factors and when exploiting quasi-natural experiments where Church exposure was determined by the random outcomes of medieval warfare. Moreover, exploiting regional and temporal variation in marriage regulations suggests that the dissolution of kin networks was decisive for the formation of communes.
The study also empirically establishes a robust link between Church exposure and dissolution of extended kin networks at the country, ethnicity and European regional level. A language-based proxy for cousin marriage—cousin terms—offers a window into the past and rules out that the dissolution was driven by more recent events like the Industrial Revolution or modernization. Moreover, the study reports a robust link between kin networks, civicness and inclusive institutions. The link between kin networks and civicness holds within countries and—getting closer to causality—among children of immigrants, who grew up in the same country but vary in their vertically transmitted preference for cousin marriage. Kin networks predict regional institutional failure within Italy, ethnicities’ local-level democratic traditions and modern-day democratic institutions at the country level. Measures for the strength of pre-industrial kin networks rule out contemporary reverse causality or the possibility that the estimates are driven by contemporary omitted variables. The analysis also demonstrates that the association between kin networks and the formation of inclusive institutions holds universally—both within Europe and when excluding Europe and countries with a large European ancestry. This universal link strengthens the hypothesis that the Church’s marriage regulations, and not some other Church-related factor, were decisive for European development.
Underlying these early institutional developments was most likely a psychology that, as a consequence of dissolved kin networks, reflects greater individualism and a more generalized, impartial morality (Schulz et al. 2018). This is a building block not only for inclusive institutions but also for economic development more generally. For example, transmission of knowledge across kin networks and the shift away from a collectivistic culture toward an individualistic one, a culture of growth, may have further contributed to Europe’s economic development (Mokyr, 2016; de la Croix, 2018).
…To build strong, functional, inclusive institutions and to foster democracy, the potentially deleterious effect of dense kin networks must be considered. Also, simply exporting established formal institutions to other societies without considering existing kin networks will likely fail. Policies that foster cooperation beyond the boundaries of one’s kin group, however, have a strong potential to successfully diminish the fractionalization of societies. These can be policies that encouraging marriages across kin groups. More generally, policies that foster interactions that go beyond the boundaries of in-groups such as family, close friends, social class, political affiliation or ethnicity are likely to increase social cohesion (pg. 41-42).
A brand new job market paper has some interesting data on assortative mating and its impact on income inequality. Drawing on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), the paper
investigates the evolution of assortative mating based on permanent wage in the U.S. since the late 1960s; quantifies its impact on rising family-wage inequality; and, finally, tries to understand the factors behind this evolution. It documents a significant increase in assortative mating, as measured by couple’s permanent-wage correlation, between families formed in the late 1960s and in the late 1980s. I then show that changes in the degree of assortative mating accounts for a sizable amount of the increase in family wage inequality across these family cohorts. This finding shows focusing on the time trends in permanent-wage inequality is not enough to understand the mechanics of increasing family wage inequality. Note, this finding does not rule out a feedback mechanism. It might be that increasing family wage inequality incentivized individuals to care more about their spouse’s wages, causing a higher degree of marital sorting along permanent wage, which in turn mechanically increased family wage inequality (pg. 23).
What is “a sizable amount”? The data show that “the trend in assortative mating explains more than one-third of the increase in family wage inequality” (pg. 11; emphasis mine). He explains,
I use the Gini coefficient in the left panel, as the measure of inequality, whereas the variance of logarithm is used in the right panel. Solid lines show the actual evolution of family wage inequality with these measures. In the dashed lines, however, I construct the counterfactual family wage inequality by holding the empirical copula distribution fixed at its initial form while letting the permanent-wage distribution vary. The dashed lines thus show the counterfactual evolution of family wage inequality if no change occurred in assortative mating. The left panel shows the rise in the Gini coefficient would be 40% lower, and the right panel shows that the rise in the variance of (log) family wage would be around 35% lower under the counterfactual scenario. The increase in assortative mating thus accounts for a significant amount of the increase in family wage inequality (pg. 11).
Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox and economist Joseph Price have an important chapter in a recent Cambridge-published book on the link between family structure and economic growth. They write,
A stable marriage matters in part because it allows couples to make decisions over time that maximize the economic prosperity of their family unit. Stably married persons have incentives to invest in their marriage and benefit from specialization and economies of scale; their households also tend to earn and save more than their peers who are unmarried or divorced (Stevenson and Wolfers 2007; Lerman and Wilcox 2014). Marriage also has a transformative effect on individuals, especially men. It seems to increase men’s productivity at and attachment toward work, and reduces men’s willingness to engage in risky behaviors, including criminal activity (Akerlof 1998; Nock 1998; Sampson, Laub, and Wimer 2006). What is more, it looks like married parenthood may be especially influential in encouraging men’s engagement in the labor force (Killewald 2012). In the aggregate, then, higher levels of marriage, and probably two-parent families, should boost men’s labor force participation and reduce criminal violence, both to the benefit of national economies. At the same time, insofar as motherhood tends to reduce women’s participation in the labor force (Budig and England 2001), we also explore the possibility that higher rates of marriage and two-parent families reduce growth. Finally, higher rates of intact marriage foster stable two-parent families, which are more likely than single parents to supply children with the human capital they need to thrive first in school and later in the labor force (Lerman and Wilcox 2014; McLanahan and Sandefur 1994). Accordingly, the more children are born and raised in stable, two-parent families, the more a society should experience economic growth (pg. 179-180).
Wilcox and Price continue to lay out the evidence that married, two-parents households:
Have more income and savings.
Lower crime rates.
Higher educational achievements for children.
They conclude,
[W]e find that a significant association between family structure and economic growth. Every 13 percentage point increase in the proportion of adults who are married is associated with an 8 percent increase in per capita GDP, net of controls for a range of sociodemographic factors. Likewise, every 13 percentage point increase in the proportion of children living in two-parent families is associated with a 16 percent increase in per capita GDP, controlling for education, urbanization, age, population size, and other factors. There is clearly a link between family structure and economic growth.
…[W]e also note that the cross-national relationship between family structure, household savings, and crime are generally consistent with our expectations about how marriage and two-parent families foster a social environment more conducive to economic growth in countries around the world. It is striking that more two-parent families are linked to less crime and more savings. If nothing else, the patterns documented in this paper suggest that stronger families, higher household savings rates, less crime, and higher economic growth may cluster together in mutually reinforcing ways.
...In conclusion, this chapter indicates that strong and stable families are linked to higher levels of economic growth in nations across the globe, despite the fact that marriage and two-parent families are in decline across much of the globe. Given the potential economic importance of marriage and family stability to a nation’s economic life, policymakers, business leaders, and civic leaders should pursue a range of public and private policies to encourage and strengthen marriage and stable families. That is because what happens in the family may not affect only the welfare of private families but also the wealth of nations (pg. 194-195).
Economic institutions at the macro-level matter. But so do the ones at the micro-level. Probably more so.
Alcohol is killing more adults in the U.S. than the opioid epidemic according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. The opioid epidemic kills an average of 72,000 people per year, while alcohol kills 88,000. In those 88,000 deaths are 2.5 million years of potential life lost, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The surge of alcohol related deaths is new. In ten years, the number of deaths by alcohol have increased 35 percent according the new report shared by USA Today on Friday. The statistics are based on findings from 2007 to 2017.
Most affected by the rising alcohol epidemic are young women. Among women, deaths rose 67 percent, while for men, the percentage rose only 27 percent.
The article concludes with a quotation from psychologist Benjamin Miller: “Culturally, we’ve made it acceptable to drink but not to go out and shoot up heroin. A lot of people will read this and say ‘What’s the problem?’”
As the elections were coming up, I noticed that many wanted to inflate their single vote with undeserved moral capital. I wasn’t having any of it, especially if they were doing so in order to smugly lecture others.
There is some debate among economists and political scientists over the precise way to calculate the probability that a vote will be decisive. Nevertheless, they generally agree that the probability that the modal individual voter in a typical election will break a tie is small, so small that the expected benefit (i.e., p[V(D)−V(R)]p[V(D)−V(R)]) of the modal vote for a good candidate is worth far less than a millionth of a penny (G. Brennan and Lomasky 1993: 56–7, 119). The most optimistic estimate in the literature claims that in a presidential election, an American voter could have as high as a 1 in 10 million chance of breaking a tie, but only if that voter lives in one of three or four “swing states,” and only if she votes for a major-party candidate (Edlin, Gelman, and Kaplan 2007). Thus, on both of these popular models, for most voters in most elections, voting for the purpose of trying to change the outcome is irrational. The expected costs exceed the expected benefits by many orders of magnitude.
While a 1-in-10 million chance is the most optimistic estimate, the average estimate is 1-in-60 million. Economist Steve Landsburg put it this way: “I have a better chance of winning the Powerball jackpot 7,400 times in a row than of affecting the election’s outcome. Which makes it pretty hard to see why I should vote.”[ref]There’s always the comeback, “If everyone thought that, it’d be a disaster!!” Well, not everyone does, so that’s irrelevant. If everyone decided they didn’t want to be a doctor, that’d be a disaster too. Yet, no one says we all have a moral duty to be a doctor. We’re talking about the meaning of your single vote, not the collective’s.[/ref]
So maybe the presidential election is a long shot when it comes to making a difference as an individual voter. Surely the midterm elections are different, right? They certainly are, but it’s not something to get excited about. As economist Casey Mulligan explains,
An election of a United States senator, or a governor, has never in the history of the United States been decided by one vote. Charles Hunter, who earned a doctorate at the University of Chicago, and I studied almost 100 years of elections of members of Congress – almost 20,000 of them in which an aggregate two billion votes were cast – and only one election was determined by a single vote of the 40,000 cast (that was in the New York’s 36th Congressional District in 1910). And that election had a recount that determined the election was decided by a margin of six votes, rather than one.
Thus, when it comes to elections to federal office, history suggests that the chances that your vote…will change the winner of the election is less than one in 100,000; more people die in an election year in car crashes than cast a pivotal vote in a federal election.
Dr. Hunter and I also studied 21 years of elections to state legislatures in the 50 states. Our data included more than 50,000 elections with an aggregate of about a billion votes cast. Those elections were markedly smaller than the federal elections and therefore more likely to come down to one vote.
Still, only nine of these came down to one vote (before recounts), and included a grand total of less than 40,000 pivotal votes. So the probability of a pivotal vote in these elections was less than one in 25,000. (The odds are somewhat higher – one in 15,000 for the state elections and one in 89,000 for Congressional elections – if the election actually has more than one candidate; a number of elections do not, such as this year’s election in Florida’s 21st Congressional District).
Let’s check those stats again:
Presidential elections: 1-in-60 million on average; 1-in-10 million at best.
Federal elections: 1-in-100,000; 1-in-89,000 for Congressional elections.
State legislators elections: 1-in-25,000; 1-in-15,000 at best.
As one friend put it, if you’re trying to get into the Good Place, voting likely earns you 10 points total.[ref]I think that’s rather high, but let’s roll with it.[/ref] That’s a blip on the moral scale.
However, these 10 points are probably cancelled out by:
The smugness that accompanies your “I Voted” sticker.
The likelihood that your Facebook status about the importance of voting is nothing more than moral grandstanding.[ref]”And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward” (Matt. 6:5). Just replace “pray” with “vote” and the synagogues and street corners with Facebook and Twitter.[/ref]
But that’s still working off the assumption that voting is an inherent good. No one seems to care that voting imposes costs on others by means of legalized violence (government). Now, those costs and the accompanying legalized violence may be justified. But if you’re going to force something on to others, you’d better be damned sure it is in fact just and worth the cost. If you’re not sure (and the social sciencesuggests you probably aren’t), stay away from the polls.
Also, voters typically want to transmit all the goodness of their political picks to themselves, while ignoring the evil. For example, many Obama supporters probably see themselves as champions of the uninsured; crusaders for healthcare justice. However, they likely do not want his drone strikes or deportations on their conscience. “Turns out I’m really good at killing people” isn’t exactly the moral motto most voters want to trumpet.
Finally, you may be risking more harm than good by simply driving to the polls on election day:
[S]uppose my favored candidate (who is worth $33 billion more to the common good) enjoys a slight lead in the polls. She has a very small anticipated proportional majority. The probability that any random voter will vote for her is 50.5 percent. This is an election we would describe as “too close to call.” Suppose also that the number of voters will be the same as in the 2004 U.S. presidential election: 122,293,332. I vote for my favored candidate. In this case, the expected value (for the common good) of my vote for the better candidate is $4.77 x 10^-2650 , that is, approximately zero. Even if the candidate were worth $33 billion to me personally, the expected value for me of my vote would be, again, a mere $4.77 x 10^-2650 . That is 2,648 orders of magnitude less than a penny. In comparison, the nucleus of an atom, in meters, is about 15 orders of magnitude shorter than I am. In meters, I am about 26 orders of magnitude shorter than the diameter of the visible universe. In pounds, I am about 28 orders of magnitude less heavy than the sun. Even if the value of my favored candidate to me were dramatically higher, say ten thousand million trillion dollars, the expected value of my vote in our example—for a close election—remains thousands of orders of magnitude below a penny. For an election in which the candidate has a sizable lead, the expected utility of an individual vote for a good candidate drops to almost zero.
The Beneficence Argument appeals to the public utility of individual acts of voting. However, suppose all you care about is maximizing your contribution to the common good. If so, voting would not merely fail to be worthwhile— it would be counterproductive. It turns out that the expected disutility of driving to the polling station (in terms of the harm a driver might cause to others) is higher than the expected utility of a good vote. This is not hyperbole.
Aaron Edlin and Pinar Karaca-Mandic have estimated the expected accident externalities per driver per year in the United States—that is, the amount of damage the average driver imposes on others from accidents and reckless driving. The expected accident externalities range from as little as $10 in low-traffic-density North Dakota to more than $1,725 in high-traffic-density California. Suppose a North Dakotan takes five minutes to drive to the polling station. The average expected accident externality of a five-minute drive in North Dakota is $9.5 x 10^-5 , much larger than the expected benefit of a good vote in the previous example. So the voter imposes greater expected harm on her way to the polls than she could compensate for by a good vote.[ref]Jason Brennan, The Ethics of Voting, pg. 19-20.[/ref]
To review:
Mathematically speaking, your individual vote has probably never mattered and likely never will matter. It literally has no consequence on the planet.
Whatever goodness your single vote represents is likely cancelled out by a number of negative factors that are the byproduct of political participation.
In actuality, voting is a means of wielding legalized violence on others.
If you’re going to congratulate yourself on the good your chosen politician does, you have to condemn yourself for the bad as well.
The risk of harming others on election day is higher than the potential benefit.
Now, this isn’t an anti-voting post. I’m not saying you should refrain from voting.[ref]Unless you don’t know jack about what or who you’re voting for. In that case, stay home. I actually think you’re a better person for doing so.[/ref] What I am saying is that before you start patting yourself on the back for supposedly righting the wrongs of the world through voting, you ought to realize that you probably did absolutely nothing.
It’s a common assertion by some people that the rich are obviously awful people. Some psychology research (especially that of Paul Piff) seems to confirm that wealth makes us worse people. However, a new study casts doubt on some of these findings, demonstrating that the field of psychology is still having replication problems. “In contrast [to Piff’s work],” write the authors,
The authors “attempted to directly replicate Piff et al.’s Study 5 (2012),” which tested individuals’ willingness to lie in a negotiation task.
In an effort to increase experimental power, the present studies sought to increase sample size from 108 to 270 (i.e., 2.5 times larger), which is considered the current standard for replication protocols (Simonsohn, 2015). We collected two independent samples in an effort to provide more opportunity to replicate the original results (e.g., larger number of participants across samples helps mitigate issues associated with sampling error).
Their results?
Some of our findings were consistent with those of Piff et al., such as the significant relations between attitudes toward greed and unethical behaviour (i.e., dishonesty) as well as between social class and greed (in sample 2 only), but we did not obtain any evidence of a positive association between social class and unethical behaviour in either sample. Further, we found inconclusive evidence for the mediation model proposed by Piff et al. across the two samples.
Perhaps the crucifixion of the rich isn’t the most empirically-based idea.
There’s a post over at the World Bank’s blog providing brief summaries of the papers presented at the North East Universities Development Consortium last weekend. If you want to see some of the latest research in development economics, check it out. Here are a few that peaked my interest:
How does a massive refugee influx affect the receiving economy’s agricultural productivity? In Tanzania, receiving refugees from Burundi and Rwanda in the 1990s resulted in some pluses, some minuses, but ultimately an insignificant change. (Tsuda)
In South Africa, income affects psychological well-being AND psychological well-being affects income. The former effect is particularly strong among the poor. (Alloush)
Psychology and economics affect each other! An intervention to increase women’s beliefs in their own ability to attain their goals “produces large and persistent increases in employment” in India. And “women who received a job offer have significantly higher [beliefs in their own ability] several months later.” (McKelway)
Ukrainian firms from counties with fewer ethnic Russians experienced a deeper decline in trade with Russia because of increased inter-ethnic tensions and a differential rise in negative attitudes toward Russia. (Makarin and Korovkin)
Poorly managed schools have poorer teacher practices and poor student outcomes. (Lemos, Muralidharan, & Scur)
School disruptions caused by teacher strikes leads to adverse labor market outcomes in Argentina: unemployment is higher, skill levels of the occupations are lower and earnings drop by 3.2 for men and 1.9 percent for women. “This amounts to an aggregate annual earnings loss of $2.34 billion, equivalent to the cost of raising the employment income of all Argentinian primary school teachers by 62.4 percent”. (Jaume and Willén)
Getting married one year later in India results in “a significant decline in physical violence, although it has no impact on sexual or emotional violence.” (Dhamija & Roychowdhury)
Cash transfers in Kenya reduced physical violence against wives regardless of whether the husband or wife received them, but they reduced sexual violence against wives only when the wives received them. (Haushofer et al.)
A multi-year intervention that “engaged adolescents in classroom discussions about gender equality” improved gender attitudes and reported gender-equitable behavior (e.g., “boys report helping out more with household chores”). (Dhar, Jain, & Jayachandran) #RCT
A soda tax in Mexico increased gastrointestinal disease because of low-quality drinking water. (Gutierrez & Rubli)
Games in Kenya show that spouses don’t totally trust each other. Letting them communicate increase trust a bit. (Castilla, Masuda, & Zhang) #LabInField
Christian missionaries settled in healthier, safer and more developed locations in 43 sub-Saharan African countries (early 20th century) and in Ghana (18th-20th century) – this endogeneity led to an overly optimistic account of the importance of colonial missions for long-term development. (Jedwab, Meier zu Selhausen, and Moradi) #RDD
A novel index of ethnic segregation – taking into account both ethnic and spatial distances between individuals and computed for 159 countries – reveals that countries where ethnically diverse individuals lived far apart, have higher-quality government, higher incomes and higher levels of trust. (Hodler, Valsecchi, and Vesperoni)
An alcohol ban led to an increase in crime in the Indian State of Bihar. Since state capacity and supply of police is fixed, diverting law enforcement resources towards implementing the alcohol ban effectively reduces capacity to prevent crimes. (Dar and Sahay)
Workers will privately accept jobs at a wage below the prevailing norm in India, but not when other workers can observe them making the choice. “Workers give up 38% of average weekly earnings in order to avoid being seen as breaking the social norm.” (Breza, Kaur, & Krishnaswamy)
Fear of sexual assault reduces women’s labor market participation in India: a one standard deviation increase in sexual assault reports within one’s own district reduced women’s employment probability by 0.36 percentage points, especially among highly educated married urban women. There is no effect of lagged physical assault reports on employment outside home. (Siddique)
